I asked Andy to guest blog for me a couple of days ago, and she sent off something right away. I didn’t read it, I was busy. But today I knew I had to post it. And post it I did. Then I read it…..and, it totally applies to the day I’m having. I may tell y’all more about it should the fallout get worse, but we’ll see. Let’s just say this- corporate world and bloggers sometimes mix poorly. Anyway, this post is great and apropos. Thanks, Andy. I owe you one….or ten.

It’s possible Amy is the slightest bit crazy for telling me I could write about whatever I want. Her blog is now in my hands mwahahaha! (that was my evil laugh)

But I also am a little ADD. It’s like she let me loose in the Chuck E Cheese and told me to pick one game. One game? But there are so many! There’s skee ball and air hockey and the ball pit (they they still have ball pits? or did they outlaw them for fear that people were hiding heroine in the balls?) and that bopp-em game! I loved the bopp-em game. Taking that big mallet and bonking the tiny plastic rodents. I may have anger issues. And hate rodents.

Anywayyyy, so I think maybe Amy is actually getting the better end of this deal because I had a blog idea swirling around in my head, but I never write my ideas down. I just hope they stay in my ADD-addled brain (which was never ADD before the Internets, bee tee double you) until Monday or Sunday when I can find coffee shop time and write everything down. And by write, I mean type. So she’s probably getting my best material which no one would have seen anyway.

I think that’s a win.

So I was discussing with the best friend crazy lady time. (That, friends, is called a brilliant segue.) Now, I know my nickname is “the crazy lady,” but I don’t mean regular crazy (like the quirky weirdo I clearly am on a daily basis); I mean the irrational crazy which comes out in frightening bursts.

See, I had a bad morning on Wednesday. Tuesday wasn’t great either. I’ve been sick with a monster sore throat and feeling all evil PMS-y and I had to get up at the asscrack of dawn on Wednesday to take my cat to the vet.

Also: I work at home. So I don’t ever get up early. Also also: I’m an eternal insomniac. So these early mornings kick my ass.

Where was I? Oh yeah, at the ass-crack of dawn. So I set my alarm to give me time to wake up, take some Dayquil, eat some breakfast, capture the cat (who now knows when these visits are coming and hides), and drive to downtown Portland before traffic starts. Except? Oh yes. The alarm didn’t go off. Of course it didn’t. Why would it? WHY?

I wake up (by some miracle of Odin) a half an hour before her appointment, threw on clothes, captured the cat, and ran out the door. No time for eating. No Dayquil. No caffeine. Nada.

So yeah, the day didn’t start well.

It just went down from there. Every stupid thing was making me insane. Every tiny thing. No one could drive of course. I couldn’t stop coughing. I got my sweatshirt dirty when taking out the trash. I bought this tuna salad that turned out to be nasty and just about had a meltdown. Because if I could eat that nasty tuna then maybe I wouldn’t starve. STARVE! And now I can’t get the bag of tortillas open. The Universe hates me. I’m going to DIE! Right. Calm down there, crazy pants. It’s just tortillas. Not worth killing anyone over.

And the worst is when you hear yourself acting crazy but just cannot stop yourself. You’re staring down the beast and you know you shouldn’t go there, because it will win, but you just keep going, running at full speed and yelling, “TOWANDA!” (If you get that reference, you are my new best friend.)

Could any of this crazy have to do with my cold? Or the insane stress I’ve been under? Or because I should start my period in, oh, what time is it? Now? Oh hell yes it does.

Hormones are a bitch.

Look, fellas. Boyos, I know you think you know what’s what. But let me tell you, you don’t. Women hold a lot of their shit together. Yes we do. We juggle it all and we keep going. With poise and class. We rock and we still look gorgeous. But until you are a woman and have felt the crazy-making boiling concoction of hormones that rules our kind, when the crazy turns on, you need to just back away slowly while handing us chocolate and pouring some wine.

So the bestie was telling me about the first time she first had a crazy lady meltdown and could hear herself being crazy but couldn’t stop it. I think we all have those stories. And they almost all include some man who thinks it’s funny or feels the need to ask if we’re getting our periods.

Poor stupid, stupid men.

Don’t anger the beast! Don’t say anything. Shh! We know we’re crazy. We hear ourselves. Do you think pointing it out helps your cause? No. No it doesn’t. I know it’s not fair. I know, punkin. I know. Do you think we want to feel this insane? We don’t. So just appease us and then go away. Quietly. I say this for your own good. I do.

Why don’t they ever listen? You’d think that men would have developed better listening skills as an evolutionary advantage, as a survival instinct. I know many a man who almost met his death when he failed to listen to a woman.

It’s no wonder men burned women as witches for centuries. They were terrified of the crazy time. I’d curse a man too if he looked at me wrong while I’m on my period, or tried to touch my boobs, or took my chocolate. It’s no wonder. They were afraid we’d murder them all and take over the world.

Here’s the secret, though, men: we don’t want to do that. Some of us actually like you. We just don’t want you saying stupid things, looking at us wrong, touching our sore boobs, or taking our chocolate.

Andy blogs at Crazy with a side of Awesome Sauce (www.crazywithasideofawesomesauce.blogspot.com) Or on Etsy Find her on the Twitter @anydygirl. To reach her by email awesomecrazylady@gmail.com.

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My kids are at camp for the week, and I’m taking the time to catch up at work. You know, the job that ACTUALLY pays the bills. So I am featuring two guest posts. The second (and last) is from Kelli (aka GuiltySquuid). She has become a close friend, and I’m lucky to have found her. She made me promise to publish this before I saw it, I swear I didn’t pay her to write it. And it may have touched my heart. Could have been indigestion, who knows. You can find her here. You can find Tuesday’s guest post from Bejewell here. These two women deserve to be read, a lot. Go do that. Not now, AFTER you read this post:

Last week, before Amy went to Blogher, she asked me to write a guest post for her. That night was insane. The same day she asked me I was coming off of two anxiety attacks in 24 hours, I was getting ready for my photoshoot for BBC2011, and I was packing to take my kids on a last minute vacation out of town.

In a nutshell? I was a mess. A hot mess. A horrible, barely held together mess who was likely to crack into a million pieces at any time.

For anyone else last week I would have said no, but this was Amy. Because Amy does a lot for everyone in her online network and she does it while asking very little in return. She will happily and cheerfully fix a broken blog while wielding snarky comments to keep you laughing and recognizing that the world has not ended and that yes, it can be fixed. She can be the glue that holds it all together.

So, after a late night of frantic packing, planning and downloading my Tom-Tom updates to install on my iPhone 4, I shut off the outside world and worked on a piece for Amy. I was actually pretty proud of it. It’s funny and full of pictures and basically the kind of post that makes me happy. Then I copied and pasted the code into a notepad file, attached it to an email and finally drug my tired ass to bed to wake up a few hours later to drive 100 miles to get my picture taken in a closet. (True story.)

I guess that in the updates on the phone and my exhaustion, I didn’t notice that the email came back as undeliverable.

And as we all know, Amy had a hard time at Blogher.

But she posted something else and I guess I just assumed that she didn’t like my post, or it didn’t fit her site, or something.

She assumed I hadn’t done it and blew her off.

Tonight we IMed about it all and all is well and I said I’d fire up the laptop and send her post off to her.

But instead? I have all of this rattling around in my head and I wanted to give y’all a little something different.

The Amys of the world are few and far between. Very few people give so generously of themselves and ask nothing in return. Amy has been really good to me since I came back and really started blogging to blog for real. She’s been a support system, a fantastic and selfless promoter of me, and she’s read every word I’ve written and commented on it. She’s included me in the amazingly awesome Blogger Body Calendar and given me an opportunity to do something for my daughter I would have never had the courage to do on my own. In short, she’s been a real friend.

The thing about me? Is that I think I’m probably a difficult friend to have, really. I am alternately needy and then so busy I don’t have time to talk for days. I get caught up in things and people have to practically YELL at me to get me to focus on something else for even a few minutes. Sometimes? I think I just imagine that my friends will be there to pick up where I left off and it all be okay.

I have a difficult time navigating the world of “girlfriends”, and that’s not easy for me to admit to you all.

I suspect it’s probably because my largest formative influences weren’t women at all. I’ve never been great at sustaining relationships with women and it’s likely due to the fact that a girl’s very fist real “girlfriend” is usually their mother and believe me when I tell you that I never had that kind of relationship with my mother.

So, I often miss the subtle context clues that other women pick up on with each other. I gravitate towards friendships with guys who don’t notice the awkwardness in me as much as women do. Or, if they do, they’ve never said. With guys, I can just hang. It’s all good and I don’t feel like I have to think about it as much. It’s a little different if it’s a guy I have real feelings for, because then? Like all relationships, it has the potential to get complicated and I don’t do well with complicated. I end up locked in a closet having an anxiety attack. That actually happens to me more than I care to admit.

Anyway, I’m getting off topic here. The point I’m trying to make is that I’m not good at the girlfriend type relationships. I have a few close girlfriends. I’ve made a few recently that I’m as comfortable with as I am with any guy. I’ve made one who is so perfect at just TELLING me what I’m missing and WHY that detail is important. But as far as I’ve come in this area (and believe me, it’s really come a long way) I’ve still got a long way to go.

I need to be better at noticing when a friend says something that is to point out that something is wrong. I need to be better at asking questions. I need to not feel (thank you all of my guy friends) that every problem a girlfriend has is one to be fixed. Sometimes, a girl has just gotta vent.

But mostly? I need to remember that friends like Amy are few and far between and sometimes. They need a little of what they give out to be given back to them. And I feel like lately I’ve failed her in that.

I hate that she didn’t have a great time at Blogher. Blogher, quite frankly, scares the holy hell out of me. It’s a social minefield that I’m not at all sure I’m prepared for navigating. But, I am sorry mostly that I couldn’t be there to say, “You know what? Let’s just go see the statue of liberty and talk.” or something that would have given her a good memory of her trip.

Basically, this whole new post is to say, Amy? Thank you.

And also? I’m sorry.

I know I’m an asshole, but thank you for being my friend in spite of that.

Diving back into blogging like I meant it has meant I’ve had to do a lot of things differently, and Amy has been there for me. To answer questions, to listen, to encourage or to just listen to me bitch. I’ve made more friends through the social networking involved that I could have possibly imagined.

Basically, I learning what’s so great about having a network of girlfriends and one of my biggest supporters has been Amy from the beginning.

Today I am appreciating Amy.

That is all.

P.S. This post may not seem like a typically Guilty Squid post, but that’s because I have DEPTH people. Layers, even. I’m a veritable seven layer did with two kinds of chips for sampling.

P.P.S. Unless some of the layers are fish and/or mushrooms.

P.P.P.S. There isn’t another one, I just liked the way the post scripts were flowing. I wasn’t ready to stop.

My kids are at camp for the week, and I’m taking the time to catch up at work. You know, the job that ACTUALLY pays the bills. So I am featuring two guest posts. The first, today, is from Bejewell. She was among the first bloggers I read, and she doesn’t get near enough exposure. She cracks me up all the time. When she went on hiatus/ break, I silently kept hoping she would come back. And she did. But before she did, I snagged her for a guest post. Thursday will be a post from Guiltysquid. These two women deserve to be read, a lot. Go do that. Not now, AFTER you read this post:

Top Five Reasons Why This Guest Post Will Suck

1. I’m on hiatus. About three months ago I put myself in a blogging time out and sent the Bean on summer vacation.  It was my own personal version of Eric Cartman’s “Screw you guys, I’m going home.”  (And if you don’t know that reference, get thee to a South Park marathon, pronto.  Pretty sure there’s one on, somewhere.)  So I haven’t written a single word in three months, unless you count the stupid captions of the ridiculous Photoshopped pictures of the Bean doing summer vacationy-type things, which I keep posting even though my mom and a couple of spinsters in East Peoria are the only people left visiting my blog.  (And I’m not so sure about my mom.)
2. Let’s just say, I’m a little rusty.
3. I’ve been on vacation. The Bean’s not the only one taking a summer break.  I spent all last week in sunny, 70-degree San Diego with my family, doing the zoo and the beach and Walt Disney.  (And if you’re muttering “That’s what she said” right now, you are both gross AND awesome and we should totally be friends.)
4. I’m no longer on vacation. My vacation ended this weekend and I came home to Austin, Texas, where it is currently ONE MILLION degrees outside and I actually have to WORK for a living and there is no beach or love or happiness of any kind.  I would say something here about how Austin and my job and everyone in the world can SUCK IT but I’m too busy icing myself down so I don’t burst into flames.
5. I didn’t get to go to BlogHer. I want to write a clever guest post, I really do — but honestly I just can’t think of ANYTHING except how spectacularly awe-tastic BlogHer ’10 was.  I didn’t actually go to BlogHer ‘10, but I know it was the BEST TIME EVER HAD BY ANYONE EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD because I cannot open Facebook or Twitter or the Internet without being smacked in the face by a zillion messages from all directions reminding me of that amazing fact.  “We all got SOOOOOO drunk at BlogHer!”  “So-and-So HUGGED ME at BlogHer!”  “Can you BELIEVE we’re at BLOGHER?!?!”  “OH NO BlogHer is over, I’m so sad I just want to CRY BUCKETS!”  Yeah, I kind of want to cry, too.  But only because I can’t actually, physically stab you in the face.  Sadly, I’m limited to stabbing you only with my mind.  And I AM, people.  Believe me. In my mind you all have stabbed faces.
6. I’m bitter and hateful and jealous and petty and mean. Pretty sure this goes without saying, but let’s just make it #5 and call it a post, shall we?